Deliberate and
systematic contrastsare such a staple
of literary procedure that people who make a habit of discussing
literature have settled on a standard term for them: foils.
The reason this technique is so common in fiction of all sorts
(narrative & dramatic, poetry and prose) is quite
simple: it is so useful -- and, in some circumstances,
all but indispensable.

If we want to draw the reader's attention to some facts in a
situation, we can of course simply mention outright all of the
particular details we want the reader to notice. But writers are
often reluctant to do this.

Indeed, if they are writing for a dramatic medium, like
the stage or film, it is impossible to do so without intrusively
destroying an illusion of reality, or at least without
interrupting the swift flow of action.) Especially in short
stories and novels written during the last hundred or so years,
many writers have made a conscious decision to avoid the omniscient
narrator -- even the impartial omniscient
narrator (who refrains from expressing evaluative
judgments about the characters and events being told of), but
especially the editorially omniscient narrator, who not
only explicitly points out what we should notice in the
"facts" of what is going on but who tells us what we
are to think about it (sometimes even explaining to us why).

There are many reasons for this "modern" reticence.

Some authors, who find themselves unable to
assert a faith in the existence of a providential deity,
argue that the omniscient narrator is a hold-over from an age
in which people believed that the world of Time and human
history itself is a work of art of an all-knowing Creator,
who rules both behind the scenes and through supernatural
intervention in nature and history to manipulate affairs in
accordance with his pre-conceived plan, or "plot"
for mankind. Others, who might be described as deists,
maintain that, while there may be a divine being who is
interested in human conduct and the outcome of human affairs
and who has foreseen in advance how things will turn out,
this deity has evidently chosen to refrain from personally
intervening in the human story. They are inclined to adopt a
similar "stance" towards the situations they
create.

Understandably, many people have found
these explanations puzzling. After all, all authors
are constantly intervening in their stories - however
invisibly - since they are responsible for
creating, by their writerly decisions, every single one of
the details that constitute the stories they create! And
besides, stories with omniscient narrators can be delightful,
sophisticated, and challenging - instead of
preachy, pedantic, or commonplace - all depending on
whether the writer knows how to handle
"authoritative" intrusions in a truly skillful way.
To appreciate this, put on your reading list for the future
two wonderful novels: Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
(1749) and Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting (1979). Fielding was certainly a believing
Anglican Christian, but Kundera is pretty obviously an
atheist. Both, however, use omniscient narration to brilliant
effect.

The real question, then, is why many modern authors,
even devoutly religious ones, often avoid omniscient
narration. The answer is probably simply that they are
fascinated with the possibilities of the game of fiction
when it is played withfirst-person narration(and
especially withunreliable narrators), with
a special sort ofthird-person narrationthat
critics somewhat awkwardly call "limited
omniscient narration," or with what is
sometimes called "objective" or
"dramatic" narration. The
fascination lies in devising a tale in which the reader
has to skillfully infer certain unstated facts of the
situation from the facts that are made explicitly
available and, further, has to arrive on his or her own
at some conception of what the point of the story is from
the author's point of view. (The reader is always, of
course, at liberty to reject the author's point of view
once it has been arrived at. The problem - the game
the writer offers the reader to play - is how to
arrive at it. And the game is no fun if the reader is at
liberty simply to "make up the facts" to suit
his own preconceived notions, or to interpret the
explicit details in just any arbitrary way.)

(1) There
are lots of different possibilities here. In one favorite
one, the narrator (not the author, but a creature of the
author) either does not know the whole truth of the story he
or she tells the (as a character within the story), or
is positively mistaken in his or her assessment of the
situation, or is deceptive and lying (perhaps even to himself
or herself). Writers who write this way do so because their
readers enjoy the challenge of having to correct the
"bent" picture they are initially confronted with,
in virtue of being forced to view the situation through the
"distorted lens" of the unreliable narrator.

(2)
Another favorite device is "objective" narration.
This is also sometimes called dramatic narration or dramatic
point of view, because the effect sought is somewhat akin
to what we get when we attend a play or view a film:
generally we view the characters and their actors "from
the outside." That is, as spectators, we are afforded
"direct" knowledge of their behavior, including
what they say. As when we witness the behavior of people
around us in our everyday situations, we have to arrive at
what they are supposedly really thinking and feeling by a
process of empathy and reasoning. That is, we have to
"figure them out."

(3)
Less stringent but often highly challenging for readers and
writers to bring off is the limited omniscient narrator.
In this case the writer adopts the stance of an impersonal
consciousness, itself not an agent in the events of the
story, able to observe the thoughts of one (or only a few)
characters. The reader is thus afforded an "inside
view" of the experience of this particular figure
(or - usually in more extended fiction, bordering on the
novel ­­ these few figures). This is clearly
something we are not able to do in "real life,"
where each of us is directly aware only of our own personal
reflections, feelings, perceptions, and is constrained to
intuit or infer what others must be experiencing. Hence the
term "omniscient." Such a narrator comes across as
reliable - as far as it goes.

(4)
The term "limited," though, points in the first
instance to the fact that (a) the
reader is able to do this only with one (or a few)
characters, and that the experience of others is reachable
only tentatively and provisionally, by empathetic skill and
reasoning.

"Limited" often points to two
other possibilities. (b) An
author may expect readers to be willing, for the purposes
of the story, to grant the hypothesis that human beings
are possessed of an "unconscious" - a
dimension of experience (thoughts, feelings, fantasies)
that they manage to remain largely unaware of, through
psychological strategies of distraction or repression. In such a case, we may be given (i.e.,
explicitly told) important details of the central
character's conscious experience - memories,
daydreams, wishes, desires, fears,
noticings-of-surroundings, actions towards others -
but expected, on the basis of these, to arrive at an
understanding of motives at work of which the character
himself is unaware. In this case we as readers are
limited in our explicit knowledge to what the character
himself knows, but this experience in turn is so designed
(by the author) as to be understandable only if we
manage successfully to go beyond that knowledge to some
called-for hypothesis of what is going on
"underneath," why it is going on, and why it is
not going on in the light of the character's own
awareness. (As you can imagine, a similar game is also
afoot in the case of unreliable first-person narrators.)

And (c) even
our appreciation of the full range of a character's
conscious experience usually requires us to reason and
empathize from the part to the whole. One of the sources
of intensity is economy, and Hemingway, especially, was
emphatic that writing is an art of selection, not only
for "subjective" events but for
"objective" ones as well:

Looking back much later at one of
his early stories, he wrote: It was a very simple
story called "Out of Season" and I had
omitted the real end of it which was that the old man
hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory
that you could omit anything if you knew that you
omitted it and the omitted part would strengthen the
story and make people feel something more than they
understood.(A
Moveable Feast [1964], p. 75)

If a writer
of prose knows enough about what he is writing about
he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if
the writer is writing truly enough, will have a
feeling of those things as strongly as though the
writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an
ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above
water. A writer who omits things because he does not
know them only makes hollow places in his writing. (Death in the Afternoon
[1932], p. 192)

Hence, even when the writer gives us
details of the inner experience of a given character, the
information we are afforded will have been carefully
chosen to imply a whole complex of additional, unstated
factors in that character's experience.

We are now in a better position to appreciate why a skillful
use of foils is a crucial part of the repertoire of so
many modern writers of short fiction - and why skillful
readers of this fiction are so adept at recognizing foils at work
and so aggressive in thinking through their significance. Setting
things in systematic and detailed contrast to each other is one
way of drawing intense attention - by throwing into
potentially stark relief - to details that get
explicitly mentioned but whose attendant facts and further
significance the writer refuses to spell out. To spell this out
is to dilute the flow of events. Or it is to deprive the reader
of the exercise of intelligent empathy. Foils therefore offer the
writer interested in psychological or social realism a way of
maintaining the illusion of reality while at the same time
maintaining the crucial distinction between art and life. That
is, the situation presented for inspection in good art will
always be more potentially clear and intelligible than the
ragged and accidental situations we are typically confronted with
in our more direct lived experience. (As we will see in the end,
though, expressionist and "surrealist" writers are
driven as well to make well-nigh obsessive use of foils in their
imaginative constructions.)

This means that an eye for significant contrast, and an
appetite for tracing out that significance, is one of the
most essential parts of the standing repertoire of any
skillful reader. Begin now to cultivate an eye for
contrast - overt and implicit ­­ in any and every
dimension of the fictions you read: